Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

Eco-tip: Nurses week honors medical environmentalist

David Goldstein, Special to Ventura County Star
Published 10:00 a.m. PT May 23, 2020

Nurses take part in a ceremony to mark International Nurses Day, celebrated on the birthday of Florence Nightingale, in Colombo on May 12, 2020.(Photo: Ishara S. Kodikara , AFP via Getty Images)

Earlier this month was Nurses Week, an internationally recognized time to honor those front-line workers who heal the sick and are today helping to protect us from a spreading pandemic.

According to the American Nursing Association website, Nurses Week originated in 1954, marking the 100th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s mission to care for soldiers injured in the Crimean War. The International Council of Nurses formalized the annual commemoration in 1974, centering it on May 12, Nightingale's birthday.

A British social reformer and statistician, Nightingale revolutionized nursing by recognizing and prioritizing the relationship between the environment and medicine. She is called a medical environmentalist for her work in transforming hospital environments, which previously were large, windowless warehouses, full of rows of beds.

She recognized the importance of windows, light, fresh air and separating patients by condition. Although the method of transmission for infections was unknown during her time, she greatly reduced the spread of infections in hospital environments.

Although many ideals of the ancient Greeks carried through to modern times, medical diagnosis took an unfortunate turn away from the Greeks, into a more a “ideological or philosophical-based (non-scientific) approach,” according to La Medecine Environnmentale.

Nightingale, and later medical leaders, such as American allergist Theron Randolph, who discovered Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome, put medical science back on track. Now, environmental medical science addresses “the true causes of diseases… not just their symptomatic effects,” according to La Medecine Environmentale, prescribing preventative measures such as “a healthier lifestyle” and “precautionary protection measures to face environmental factors causing the diseases and afflictions.”

Nurses and other medical providers honor Nightingale’s legacy by caring not just for those afflicted by their environments, but also for the environment itself. At the most basic level, this includes managing the waste generated by their own facilities’ medical procedures.

For example, last year, the Ventura County Medical Center, in Ventura, and the Santa Paula Hospital together organized the salvage of over 7,600 pounds of medical devices and products. Items no longer sufficiently able to be sterilized for reuse locally were packed and provided to Stryker Incorporated, a company which also serves several other local medical facilities.

This included items such as ligatures, ultrasonic scalpels and oximeters. Rather than paying for these items, Stryker, which operates specialized sterilization and reconditioning equipment, funded the planting of 93 trees in the Monongahela National Forest.

Each year, reforestation efforts occur in a different location, with a number of trees dedicated to each of their customers, in accordance with the amount of medical items salvaged.

Some hospitals in Ventura County not only recycle bottles, cans, paper, and the normal items expected for recycling in public places. They also pay extra for separate collection of their food waste.

For example, both the Ventura County Medical Center and Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura have food scraps collected by E.J. Harrison & Sons, and St. John’s Regional Medical Center has food scraps collected by the city of Oxnard.

Until a local facility can be developed to compost these scraps, Harrison hauls collected food waste to a transfer site in Simi Valley, and Oxnard hauls the material to a transfer site in Sun Valley; in both cases material is then hauled to Kern County to be turned into compost.

You can also help properly manage medical waste. Bring expired medications and used needles to proper disposal facilities, which you can find under the “hazardous” tab at earth911.com. When you pick up a prescription, at your consultation for how to take a drug or use a syringe, ask the pharmacist to include information about how to properly discard leftover materials.

When you are recovering in a hospital room or waiting in a patient room at a doctor’s office, do not use the container labeled “bio waste” without consulting an attending medical professional. Items in those containers must be specially handled, at great expense.

You also sometimes have an opportunity for an unusual type of reuse. Some one-time use items used on you, such as scissors and blue plastic sheets, may still be useful to you, and if you ask, medical professionals often allow you to take them home for repurposing.